How Qaddafi Fooled Libya and the World

Though he sold himself as either a costumed buffoon, a wild-eyed terrorist, or a wary reformer, Qaddafi's rule from his unlikely rise to his inevitable fall was one of the most cunning and improbable feats of modern dictatorships

Qaddafi speaks to the summit meeting of the nonaligned nations in Sri Lanka, August 1976 / AP

In the first few months of 1969, Libya was so filled with rumors
that the country's senior military leadership would oust the king in a
bloodless coup that, when the coup actually happened on September 1,
nobody bothered to check who had led it. A handful of military vehicles
had rolled up to government offices and communication centers, quietly
shutting down the monarchy in what was widely seen as a necessary and
overdue transition. King Idris's government had become so incapable and
despised that neither his own personal guard nor the massive U.S.
military force then stationed outside Tripoli intervened.
Army units around the country, believing that the coup was an implicit
order from the military chiefs, quickly secured local government
offices. Not a single death was reported; all of Libya, it seemed, had
welcomed the military revolution.

It was not until almost a week
later that an unknown 27-year-old lieutenant with the army signal corps
announced that he and a group of 70 low-level officers had in fact
staged the coup. They had, in a sense, faked the senior military
takeover that everyone had been expecting. But by then it was too late
-- the upstarts were already in charge of Libya. The young signal corps
lieutenant, a nobody named Muammar al-Qaddafi who'd been raised in a
Bedouin tent, had effectively tricked Libya and its powerful Western
allies into helping him take over a country he had no business ruling.

Qaddafi
would control Libya for an astounding four decades, one of the longest
tenures of any non-royal leader in modern history, every year of which
was as improbable as his initial ascent. He ruled as he'd seized power,
by deception and misdirection. In Libya, he was feared far beyond his
might and respected far beyond his support, both which in the end proved
meager. Abroad, he was considered either a "mad dog," as Ronald Reagan
called him, too wildly dangerous to confront directly; or, later, a
harmless buffoon who paraded in absurd costumes and made uproarious
speeches. Maybe he really was crazy, but that craziness was often more
appearance than reality, and it was the perception more than anything
else that allowed him to hold on to power for 42 years.

There's a
popular Bedouin saying that, if you have a bag of rats and you want to
keep the rodents from escaping, you have to keep shaking the bag. The
saying has become so popular in Libya that a version of it now features
Qaddafi as the bag-shaker. In this telling, the rats are Libyans, but
they might as well represent all of us. Qaddafi's ability to constantly
shift his approach to rule within Libya and foreign policy without
guaranteed, more than anything else, his ability to stay in power
despite little popular support at home and a world that largely despised
him.

The laws and norms of Qaddafi's Libya have changed so
frequently and so unpredictably over the past 42 years that Libyans, like rats
in a shaking bag, were often so focused on adjusting to the
ever-shifting political ground that they had few real opportunity to
organize. In 1971, Qaddafi announced an Arab Socialist Union party would
help lead the transition to open democracy, but by 1972 any political
activity outside of this party was a crime punishable by death. In 1973,
Qaddafi scrapped the ASU-led system -- leaving the officials who had
clamored their way into what they thought would be positions of power
now powerless -- for a system of what he called Popular Committees. This
process continued endlessly for his entire rule.

One day the
country's government would be a direct democracy of locally appointed
councils, the next it would be based on tribal rule, and the day after
that Qaddafi might announce national elections that he would later cancel. First labor unions would be promoted to greater power, then
academics, then clergy; all three would be, at some point during his
reign, outright abolished. Within political and social bodies of every
kind, Qaddafi would play one official off of another, promoting sons
above their fathers, pitting the members of too-powerful families or clans or unions against one another for
resources, splitting so many allies and creating so many feuds and petty
rivalries that it was nearly impossible that any two Libyans could come
together to ask one another if there might be another way.

Economically, oil-rich
Libya should look more like Dubai than the poor, under-developed nation
it has become. Qaddafi's Libya produces 0.27 barrels per citizen per
day; the United Arab Emirates (where Dubai is located) produces 0.34
barrels per citizen per day. Yet the average Emirati is three times as
wealthy as the average Libyan, according to IMF data on gross domestic
product at purchasing power parity per capita. Why are Libyans poorer on
average than Mexicans while Emiratis richer than Americans? The
country's oil wealth financed Qaddafi's lavish lifestyle, true, but
perhaps more than anything else the self-proclaimed Leader of the
Revolution used the money to maintain his own unlikely rule. It was more
than just patronage, though Qaddafi often used high-paying jobs and
contracts to buy off enemies and to turn alliances into bitter rivalries. He
developed enormous projects to give people hope for the future and then cancel them at the last moment -- usually blaming some enemy, foreign or domestic. At times, he would knock down or
rebuild the Libyan economy itself, secure that oil wealth would keep
flowing.

Though he never published an academic article on the
subject, his actions could at times give the impression that he may have been one of the world's great
experts in revolutions and democratic uprisings. At (almost) every turn,
when the end of his rule should have been inevitable, he found a way to
cheat the fate that nearly every theory of revolution says he should
have fallen to long ago. When the middle class grew too strong, he
abruptly changed the currency, collapsing personal savings. When
businesses became too powerful, he opened up more government subsidies
to shut them down. When government leaders and ministries earned enough
influence to potentially challenge his rule, he shifted their power to
popular councils. One year he might free political prisoners, the next
put them into mass graves. His secret police were everywhere, but so
were his handouts. When people got sick of it and rallied, he had a
senior official send in riot police; then he'd declare common cause with
the protesters and sack the official. He formed new democratic
institutions. Yet, somehow, he always ended up in charge.

Abroad,
he was just as savvy, just as willing to ruthlessly strike at his rivals one moment and to join them the next. Two of his first
foreign policy decisions were to guarantee the U.S. military base its safety, ensuring early American support, and then, when he no longer needed the U.S., to
kick the Americans out forever, winning support from anti-Western
movements at home. Foreseeing the rise of revolutionary movements in
1970s post-colonial Africa perhaps better than any other world leader,
he gave them money and training when they needed it most, building a
continent of deeply indebted allies, some of which held their allegiance
until the very end. He declared himself a lifelong ally of his fellow
Arab leaders and then an enemy of them, fighting a war with Egypt and
threatening the lives of Saudi royal family members.

In the
mid-1980s, when the West became interested in spreading democracy in
his region, Qaddafi's government launched a string of terrorist attacks,
most infamously the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am flight over Scotland that
killed 270 people. The decade and a half of near-war with the West was
tense enough to rally Libyans behind Qaddafi (and to make them more
fearful of Western governments) but peaceful enough to ensure he was
never in any real danger. After September 11, 2001, Qaddafi saw an
opportunity to make the U.S. an ally in his never-ending war against his
own people. He sold out the Islamist movements he had helped inspire,
shipping many of them to U.S.-sponsored prisons in Egypt or elsewhere.
He pledged to dismantle his nuclear program in 2003, but managed to hold onto it until late 2009.

When
Qaddafi shipped favored son Saif off to Great Britain for school, he
created a foil that, perhaps more than anything else, ensured the West's
hesitant acquiescence. Saif appeared to be a passionately pro-Western,
pro-American, pro-capitalist reformer: he authored a thesis on
democratization and social mobilization (which later turned out to be
plagiarized), met with Western government officials and industry leaders
to promise them great things, and even drafted a Libyan constitution.
Father Muammar, always shaking the bag, alternatively embraced and
rejected Saif's reforms, making it appear that his family was in the
midst of an earnest struggle for Libya's future. Qaddafi's biggest and
greatest sell was that, however awful his own rule had been, presumed
successor Saif would lead the country to prosperity and democracy if
only the world (and Libyans) would let the family remain in power
undisturbed. And, for years, it worked, just like so many of Qaddafi's
schemes and plots.

It was not until the February revolution began
that it all came tumbling down. Troops fired on protesters ruthlessly,
but quickly disintegrated when popular protests grew; the regime's
support and strength, it turned out, was not what it had appeared. Saif
promised "rivers of blood," outing the inner Muammar that had likely
been there all along. Young people from across society, middle aged
technocrats, the expat survivors of Qaddafi's decades-long quest to
assassinate the most prominent exiled activists, and minority groups
rapidly came together in the first real, mass Libyan social movement
since the country had fought off Italian colonists a century earlier.
Qaddafi's supposedly iron grip on the country appeared to have been
little more than a ruse, albeit one he had maintained for more
than a generation. That he fell is not the surprise -- it's that he ever ruled at all.